Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible.
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

This is one of the few poems which has imho done justice to the
concept of Death. The poem itself is pretty simple, but the imagery
conjured is quite nice. I especially like the rather abrupt way in
which the poem begins, rather beautifully capturing the phase
transition which seperates death from life. The rest deals with the
passage of time after death in a manner that seems to immortalise
the theme.
Mukund.

To me, the excellence of this poem is in its masterful phrasing and inthe idea that Death is a gentleman. But its use of the standard myth ofDeath as a guy who comes and gets you and takes you away in his vehiclemakes me wonder if there are any poems where Death is female. I wouldalso like to see a poem where some person decides to go pick up Deathrather than waiting for him to arrive!

A scarier thought is that someone once pointed out to me that parts ofColeridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" could be sung to the tune of"Gilligan's Island."

At any rate, regarding a female Death, oddly enough she's been representedthat way not once but at least twice in the are of comic books. There aresome issues in the seventies regarding an alien named "Thanos" who wasquite litterally in love with Death, whom he saw as female. He wanted todestroy all of creation as a sort of a wedding present. I believe theseissues were the work of Mike Carlin

More recently, there's Neil Gaiman's "Sandman," where the main character isthe personifcation of Dream, and his older sister is Death. As opposed toCarlin's Death, whom I believe is a fairly impersonal figure, Gaiman's isvery personable, and in fact quite likable. She has a sort of a goth look(chalk-white skin, which Dream also has, and wears black with an ankharound her neck,) but she a fairly cheery personality. An interestingcontrast.

There's also an episode of "The Twilight Zone" that comes to mind, onecalled "Nothing in the Dark," where an old woman is seen hiding from Death,believing Death to be a real individual who appears in many disguises. Iwon't go into too much detail, but she is fooled into letting in Death(played by a young Robert Redford,) tending him for a while (he isdisguised as a wounded policeman) and telling him her fears. When he isrevealed to be Death, he's more comforting than ominous. "What you thoughtwas terrible, passed with only a whisper. What you thought was the end,was only the beginning." Good ep.